Word.ws English Dictionary

dead last

dead last adjective: finishing in last place in a competition or ranking, often by a considerable margin to the next to last place finisher or after an exceptionally poor showing or season.

Adjective

dead last (not comparable)

  1. (derogatory, idiomatic) Finishing in last place in a competition or ranking, often by a considerable margin to the next to last place finisher or after an exceptionally poor showing or season.
    • That high-school football team only scored 18 points all year! No wonder they were dead last in the league.
    • And compared with Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and 14 European countries, the United States ranks dead last, with the highest death rate for people under age 75 from conditions that could have been treated or prevented with timely medical care.2008 October, Mark Jenkins, “Need surgery? Call a travel agent”, in Men's Health, volume 23, number 8, →ISSN, page 152
    Synonyms:
    dead first

Synonyms of dead last

Questions about dead last

What does dead last mean?
Dead last means finishing in last place in a competition or ranking, often by a considerable margin to the next to last place finisher or after an exceptionally poor showing or season.
What part of speech is dead last?
Dead last is an adjective.

Words near dead last in the dictionary

  1. dead internet theory
  2. dead key
  3. dead keys
  4. dead language
  5. dead languages
  6. dead last
  7. dead leaf
  8. dead leaves
  9. dead leg
  10. dead legs
  11. dead letter

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead last (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-dead last.ogg.

Cite this entry: “dead last.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dead_last. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.